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CES 2012 and the PS Vita (Photo credit: Pop Culture Geek)

Fellow Forbes contributor Jason Evangelho asked a simple question on Facebook just before Christmas. What was the best piece of tech/hardware released in 2012? After a few moments of thought, I replied "The PS Vita." Having spent some time to think about the answer, I'm still confident it's the right one. The problem with Sony's next generation portable gaming console was not the hardware, it was everything else.

The PS Vita was one of the best signposts of the future in the gaming world, though. The console exposed two major areas where the industry has moved on in the last few years, and where Sony had failed to follow.

The mobile ecosystem is awash with applications and games. Wherever you turn there are high quality applications available, many either free or at the 79p mark. Turn to the launch titles of the PS Vita, and you find titles like Uncharted Golden Abyss going for £45, Wipeout 2048 and Lumines at £35, and the 'feeling like a tech demo' Little Deviants for £18.

One game for the PS Vita, or over 55 games for your iPhone. That's not a tough call to make.

Sony stayed with the strategy of a slight subsidy on the hardware with a huge mark up on the gaming titles. It has served them well in the past with the Playstation consoles and the PSP. But the world has moved on. Developers find value through in-app purchasing, through advertising, and through volume sales.

As the economy stalled, the upfront cost of the PS Vita did not look attractive. Add in the price of a single game, and the restriction to online gaming so that a second hand version of the game would need an additional purchase to restore online features... while the gamer in me was itching to buy in, anyone looking for gaming value for money was going to be looking elsewhere.

Arguably with both Wifi and 3G data connectivity the PS Vita should have been a mobile success, but it never happened. Even with competitive subsidies and attractive price cuts after a few months on the market, the Vita's appearance in mobile phone stores was significantly reduced.

While there is a hardcore gamer crew who love a dedicated gaming devices, everyone else is more than happy with the gaming offered by smartphones and tablets. At the launch of the PSP in 2004 the mobile gaming ecosystem was built around J2ME mobile games or native code running on low powered handsets. The PSP was the powerhouse in town, with the Nintendo DS the plucky underdog that won on volume.

And the hardware fetishists? Well there wasn't much on offer to stand up against the high end smartphones and tablets.

If you wanted powerful mobile gaming, your answer eight years ago was the PSP. Nowadays, the quad-core graphics processor in the PS Vita can be found in the iPhone 5, the majority of leading smartphones have double the amount of RAM found in the PS Vita, and the core of the Cortex-A9 CPU features in Apple's A5.

But the numbers don't tell the whole story, there needs to be some emotion in there as well. And that's why the PS Vita is my 'hardware of the year'. Because it does feel like a proper gaming machine in my hands; because physical controls, analogue sticks, and proper clicky buttons do make the difference; because when it works it's a wonderful machine.

Sony got the hardware spot-on and the PS Vita was perfect. It's just everything else they mis-read.